BOXING

BOXING; Up Against the Ropes, Giving It Her Best Shot

By FRED BIERMAN

Published: February 23, 2004

Jackie Kallen is not your typical boxing manager. In fact, she is not even likely to be mistaken for a boxing fan.

Despite appearances, Kallen, who has two sons and two grandsons, has twice been nominated for manager of the year.

Most famous for breaking into the male-dominated world of boxing and managing James Toney to an International Boxing Federation middleweight title, Kallen's life is the subject of a movie, ''Against the Ropes,'' starring Meg Ryan. The movie was released Friday.

''I was not quite sure that she could play tough and feisty,'' the 57-year-old Kallen said of Ryan. ''I'm not a cute little tousled-hair kind of casually dressed person. I've always gone more for the glamour.''

But it was not the glitz of fight night that drew her to boxing.

In 1977, Kallen was working as an entertainment reporter for a newspaper in the Detroit area and covered a Tommy Hearns fight. As a suburban mother, Kallen had not paid much attention to boxing, but she says she was immediately struck by Hearns's intensity.

''Tommy had an especially ferocious way of looking at somebody,'' Kallen said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles earlier this month. ''I thought, 'He's the meanest person I've ever seen up close.' ''

But what Kallen said she found particularly interesting was the boxers shaking hands after the fight.

''What kind of intensity, focus and concentration that it takes to be able to go from one extreme to the other,'' she said. ''I was just intrigued by it.''

Her curiosity led her to the famous Kronk Gym in Detroit, where Hearns trained and where she got a job doing publicity on the side. She eventually spent more and more of her free time at the gym.

''I just loved every day of it,'' she said. ''It was hot and sweaty. God knows what I liked about that.''

After 10 years at Kronk learning from the trainer Emanuel Steward and the fighters around the gym, she got her license to become a boxing manager. In the late 1980's, she found her first fighter: Bobby Hitz, a heavyweight most famous for losing to George Foreman.

Six months after signing Hitz, she signed Toney, a relative unknown from the streets of Detroit, and her career was on its way.

What separated Kallen from many other managers and what brought fighters her way was her style of managing. She took an interest in her fighters outside the gym and was fond of inviting her friends from the gym over to her house for barbecues.

''On a Sunday, we'd be at her house, and me and Emanuel Steward would be making ribs on the grill,'' said Hitz, who runs Hitz Productions, a boxing promotion firm in Chicago. ''She lived in this nice, quiet, quaint, predominantly Jewish upper-crust kind of neighborhood, and we infiltrated it, all the guys.''

She also helped her fighters learn some of the life lessons that the streets of Detroit failed to teach. For example, she helped Hitz establish a good credit rating and taught G.E.D. classes to fighters.

''What she tried to do is give us some direction, set us up for life after boxing,'' Hitz said. ''So many guys just focus on the boxing aspects of it, there's no game plan after that.''

But Kallen was not running a charity. In 1991, Toney knocked out Michael Nunn to win the I.B.F. middleweight title and Kallen had her first championship. That year, she received her first nomination for manager of the year.

''It was so much validation,'' Kallen said. ''I use that word a lot, but that's what it was. It was saying you're not just a good manager for a woman, you're a good manager.''

Kallen received another nomination in 1994 and had other champions, like the superwelterweight Bronco McKart, and she even signed Hearns later in his career.

But just when it seemed as if she was on top, things began to unravel. She had an acrimonious split with Toney after he lost his title in 1994 to Roy Jones Jr., and her marriage of 30 years dissolved. She also had to deal with the scare of two lumpectomies.

As a result, she worked less with fighters and said she relied increasingly on the lessons that she learned at the gym to help her through this rough period.

''I realized through boxing that all the metaphors that I learned and all the trite little expressions became very applicable to my life,'' Kallen said. ''I actually ended up writing a book about it called, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot.' ''

The book's success led to many speaking engagements, and then Paramount came calling, wanting to turn her life into a movie. The movie says it is ''inspired by'' rather than based on Kallen's life and takes many liberties with the facts. But for Kallen, seeing the movie rekindled some old memories. She was also the commissioner of the International Female Boxing Association and she is still managing some fighters.

''I really got the bug again,'' she said. ''At the premiere, I mean seeing that movie again just made me hungry for another champion.''

Photo: Jackie Kallen playing a reporter in ''Against the Ropes,'' a film inspired by her career as a boxing manager. (Photo by Paramount Pictures)